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The size of the floorball team will have a great impact on the team spirit, it’s harder to get a good team spirit within larger teams. In floorball teams with good team spirit the team members also tend to take greater responsibility of the negative results.

The team spirit will also most likely increase if your floorball players make great efforts or sacrifices during a floorball game. Increased team spirit will end up in greater attendance on floorball practices and more sacrifices from the players for the team during games, they will also more easily respect the team norms, like coming in time.

The level of team spirit will also affect the demand on leader behavior, task oriented (low team spirit) or relation oriented (high team spirit). High team spirit is most of the times connected to more democratic leadership.

Players in the starting formation tend to feel higher team spirit than substitutes in a losing team, but in a successful team difference is less visible between substitutes and starting formation.

In addition for clear common goals, communication and roles within the team, there are some additional things to consider regarding building up team spirit.
– Pride for the team and what the team is doing
– Team identity which will start from the game jerseys

Avoid sub-groups within the floorball team, make all of your players to know each other, this can be done through solving tasks together or with regularly meetings with the team and teambuilding activities.

When you genuinely help or support others they will do the same for you. When your players are there fully for each other, they will support each other, no matter what. One of the players supporting another will next time receive genuine support back. It’s somehow build into our system, if you get support or get something, you want to give something back. You show respect and you get respect back. You show appreciation and you get appreciation.

This is of course why shops have their demonstrations of food for example, you taste, and you feel immediately you need to do something back (at least most of us), buy the product. Try to transfer this thinking and acting into your team. You can go back and look for the Champions League games Inter played during 2010 when they won. They were there for each other all the time, and of course not only on the football field.

Mourinhos coaching and football practices mixes the best technical features from the Spanish La Liga, the best tactical skills from the Italian Serie A and the physics of the English Premiere league. This could be a good mix, right?

Mourinho has strict rules on shin pads on the football practices, since he uses condensed space in a lot of his drills to encourage competitive situations, aggression and speed in practice game situations.

Mourinho believe in control and his coaching methods focus on what is in his direct control, his opinion is that the only factor he can not control are the supporters.

One of his priorities is keeping things simple and therefore try to remove the complexity or simplify it. Focus or concentration is an another important area for Mourinhos’ players, the message is that the opponents are not stupid and can potentially have the same methods… In terms of weakness of the opponents Mourinho will try to and practice taking advantage of the individual player weaknesses, such as height of players or weak foot.

Other aspects of his leadership and coaching include a “brutal honesty”, with strict eye to eye contact and he does not censor his word no matter who the player, that you can read in the newspapers and in this book.

Mourinho believes in hard work ethics and a balanced game system, so it’s not about attacking or defending, it’s about balance between these two factors.

Your kids have been racing up and down the field for a few hours. They’re tired, they’re thirsty and pretty soon they’re going to be downright cranky on you.

What do you give them to boost their energy level and keep their mind and bodies in the floorball game? Too many youth floorball players don’t realize just how important it is to eat a healthy and balanced diet in order to stay healthy as well as to optimize their performance in the floorball rink.

Provide a variety of healthy snacks that are nutritionally dense in order to both please your youngsters palates and fuel up their bodies in an optimal manner. Here are some suggestions to replace those doughnuts and ice cream bars at half time.

Here are some suggestions and healthful snacks to give your youth athletes:

Stress affects floorball performance

The figure above is showing the performance of two equal floorball players (capacity, when they are at their best), the difference is on their stress levels. A players optimal performance might be in the beginning, middle or at the end.

The first line/player will perform well or at his/her best with lower demands and stress level, while player two needs and can play at his/her best with high demands and expectations.
Do you know these curves for your players? Who will perform well in critical situations and who will be at their best with low expectations? These curves are just two examples, you would probably have as many different lines as you have players.

Each floorball game is a practice game, until you earn your living on playing floorball. That’s a quite good attitude to have, to keep the right perspective on things and situations, to try to keep the stress level on an acceptable level.

Repetition is a powerful teaching method and tool, remember the 10 000 hours of practice or the Pareto 20/80 rule (coming later). Through repetition, a new idea will be integrated as a normal thing, even if it from the beginning was innovative or new. The same goes for floorball practices and drills, repeat, repeat and your floorball players will integrate what you have been practicing on, to the game. We often need to be reminded, rather than instructed?

Messi, Eto’o and Ronaldo feints

You can see those incredible feints done by Messi, Eto’o, Ronaldo and others, and we are amazed, how did he come up with that or how was he able to do that? The answer is simple, through repetition and hours of practice, to automatize the moves.

Social facilitation

An aspect to consider when you are introducing a new floorball skill drill, is theopposite of social loafing, social facilitation, it means that we will perform better when we have people around us watching, but there is a but, it’s only easier tasks or well-known activities that is will apply on. When you are learning or practicing a new floorball skill you don’t want a lot of people or team members watching you, it will only make you nervous, stressed and insecure.
So when you practice a new moment, you might split up your floorball team in small groups to lower the physical and psychological arousal level and therefore get a better learning environment. When your players are more familiar with the new floorball drill/technical moment you can start to do the practice in bigger groups in order to raise the arousal level to be more like a game situation.

David Beckham, free kicks

A young David Beckham was practicing free kick after free kick “alone” in the nearest park. Since he was alone, he could practice with a low arousal level, automize and learn the correct technique. If you add visualization to this practice you have a powerfull tool for the future.

He was lucky?

He was so lucky or their team had more luck than us. Have you heard these words? This at least something you might hear many times, when people are successful, but the people saying those words, don’t know what’s behind the luck, hard work and commitment, the more you practice “the luckier” you get.
Look at Mourinho is he lucky or is it luck? For me it’s quite obvious it’s thousands of hours of hard work, learning, studying and practice. Success doesn’t just happen because the stars line up in your team, it’s created. Look once again on the leadership model, can this be your formula for “luck”?

“Is it because we have been lucky? Of course not. It’s about anything else but lucky when you’re talking about my players. “ /José Mourinho

The last theme on the International coaching training, was goal scoring and goalie techniques. I have chosen to only translate the goal scoring part to floorball from hockey.

I wrote earlier about what is important when you practice to score goals in floorball.
– Shoot quickly
– Shoot with precision
– Shoot hard/fast
– “Hide” the shot
– Shoot unannounced

Here are some other aspects, like the distnace from where you are shooting from.
This is a picture how the goal and goalie looks like from a longer distnace (if you shoot early).

By moving just 1,5 meter closer the goal and goalie, the free space in the goal is radically reduced, and therefore also the goal scoring opportunities.

Shoot earlier if you want the best odds to score a goal in floorball.

Move in the sight

During this lesson, it was also recommended from a goalie point of view to move in the sight a little bit, you don’t need to hit the post and in, to score a goal. Shots close to the goalie body are many times hard to catch and you also minimize the risk of missing the goal totally, and then you will definitely not score goals.

Freeze the goalie

The skill level of the goalies has also dramatically improved, and a technique to improve the goal scoring chances is to “freeze” the goalie before the actual shot or pass to teammate. Freezing means the goalie is totally prepared for shot in first moment, but instead the shot or pass comes in the next moment.
This can be done with a small shot feint, pass feint or other move that makes the goalie believe “OK, now the shot comes”. When the goalie makes a small reaction in the first step, it will reduce the time for the actual save in the next step, either it’s a shot or pass to a teammate who will shoot.

How do you show this when you step in to the changing room? How is your body language? What do you stand for?

Inspire your self and your teammates to success!

Norway made one of their best World Championship Tournament results in 2012, they were “unlucky” to meet the coming world champions Russia early in the Play Off’s, a thing they could not control (who they will meet), but they were well prepared, 2-2 in the third period…
Russia 5 – 2 Norway (Quarter finals)
Russia 6 – 2 Finland (Semi-finals)
Russia 6- 2 Slovakia (Final)

As one of the steps to develop Norwegian hockey, and the physical status of the players, the “Ironman” competition was started.

All the players and teams are part of the Ironman competition, the players/team get points on their result in physical events, like 40 m sprint, 3000 m running, and different strength and jumping excercises.
If you or your team is not physically prepared for the upcoming season, it will be revealed here.

The Ironman event has put the physical practice in focus, as planned from the beginning, this is also a big thing for media.

The score in the different physical excercises, are categorized on four levels
1. Machine (Elite level)
2. Towards the Elite level
3. Should be improved
4. Hobby level

2012 Ironman winner was Jonas Holos, to mention something, he had the time 10,30 on 3000 m running, not bad for a 95 kg / 209 lbs defenseman…

I continue with some valuable things from Dave Smiths lecture, from the international coaching seminarium.

He talked about the complexity in hockey, you need to skate, do stick handling and take decissions, which is not possible if you haven’t automized some of the skills or moves. If your skating isn’t automized, you need to focus on that and loose stick handling and good decissions.

Same principles can be applied on floorball, if you don’t have good and fast feets moving automatically, you will have problems with the game.
1. Quick and fast feets (coordination skills)
2. Good stick handling skills
will automatically give you more time on focusing on the game itself and to make good decissions during the game.

Test the footwork and coordination skills

You can test these coordination skills by a simple practice. Let your players run standing on the same spot, add stick handling and start to ask them questions. Do they drop in speed or have problems performing these two things together, then you know you need to work extra either on footwork or stick handling. Below an example from the stick handling and ball control eBook found on this page >>